Companions in the World: Healing Environmental Racism
Striving to Heal Environmental Racism
By Ariel Miller, SCHC, Ohio-Kentucky Chapter
In 2020, Companions in Greater Cincinnati became aware for the first time of the trauma caused to generations of families in the black municipality of Lincoln Heights by the constant sound of gunfire from the adjoining Cincinnati Police Department firing range. As unprecedented factors combined to produce the political commitment to finally move the firing range, we began a quest to equip Lincoln Heights students to interrupt the chronic stress of fight-or-flight and offer them the skills to solve conflict nonviolently.
The current Cincinnati Police Department firing range in Evendale is separated from multi-family housing in Lincoln Heights only by a scraggly row of trees. Lincoln Heights families and elected officials have been pleading with the City of Cincinnati for decades to move it, unavailingly. The issue finally reached the wider public at the height of the pandemic in 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd. Teachers in the multi-community Princeton School district could hear gunfire in the background as their Lincoln Heights students attended classes virtually from their homes. A Lincoln Heights mother testified to a special hearing of the Cincinnati City Council that October that her little son told her, “I think they are practicing to shoot at me.”
Companions in our chapter belong to two parishes that have long partnered with St. Simon, Lincoln Heights, and the Sisters of the Transfiguration on many projects since the Rev. Michael Curry, serving then as rector of St. Simon’s, launched a collaboration called ACTS in the 1980s. Though I’ve been part of this teamwork for decades, I had no idea of the ongoing trauma caused to Lincoln Heights families until our churches’ outreach leaders began meeting by Zoom with Lincoln Heights teams during the pandemic to discuss how to get emergency food to people in need while the area’s major pantry was temporarily forced to suspend its services. Carlton Collins, then executive director of Lincoln Heights Outreach, was part of the work. He told us how young parents of the Heights movement were mounting an intensive campaign to get the firing range moved.
Collins reported the deep concern of parents over the life-long harm to their children from hearing gunfire and police loudspeakers almost every day: chronic fight-or-flight stress causes neurological damage and cardiovascular disease. Teachers from the Princeton School District, including retired principal Dianne Ebbs, a member of Christ Church Cathedral who has long led the Summer Camp Reading ministry which includes annual literacy classes at St. Simon of Cyrene, confirm how easily children and youth from Lincoln Heights are triggered.
In early 2021, we teamed up with St. Simon, Christ Church, Glendale, and the sisters’ St. Monica’s Recreation Center in Lincoln Heights to equip middle school students to handle their fear and anger by teaching them peer mediation as a non-violent way to resolve conflicts. We added our voices to the county-wide advocacy to move the firing range. All four congregations committed outreach funds annually, and we partnered on grant proposals to enable us to hold Peace Leaders Camps under the leadership of seasoned teachers from the Center for Social-Emotional Learning (CSEL). Every session also includes yoga, drum circles, and other arts classes.
The first camp, held at Christ Church, Glendale, in 2022, was funded with the help of a William Cooper Procter grant from the Diocese of Southern Ohio. We’re now in the second year of helping to implement CSEL’s grant from the Greater Cincinnati Foundation to recruit, train, and support peer mediation at Princeton Middle School.
October of 2024 brought breakthroughs! On Friday, October 22, Hamilton County, Ohio, hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the new regional law enforcement training center where the Cincinnati Police Department firing range will be moved! NOT ONLY THAT: a consortium of citizens is developing a proposal to turn the former firing range in Evendale into a sustainability hub, a resource which would significantly expand Greater Cincinnati’s capacity to efficiently collect and reuse materials that clog our landfills. If it succeeds, this project would be true reparation: replacing generations of environmental injustice with assets for recreation and sustainable economic development.
On October 21, I got an email inviting me to a brainstorming meeting on the Sustainability Hub proposal. The initial concept includes sustainable energy generation, a factory to produce construction materials from recycled plastic, large-scale composting, refrigeration for rescued food, walking trails, community gardening, and a classroom and office building.
I will be joining the planning. This is a tough sell for land that has long been sought as a piece of an evolving regional aerospace manufacturing corridor, but the Sustainability Hub is another way to generate economic development. This new land use would replace generations of environmental racism, where residents of Lincoln Heights suffered ongoing traumatic exposures and the rest of us ignored it.
The City of Cincinnati’s decision to move the firing range was catalyzed by an unprecedented combination of factors: nationwide attention to police violence against unarmed Black people and the flow of federal COVID funding. As the Black Lives Matter movement made headlines, the young Lincoln Heights advocates won powerful, in-depth coverage from both national and local media.
This is a story of women stepping forward to protect children. The county commissioners – all women, including former Lincoln Heights Village Manager Stephanie Summerow Dumas –showed incredible leadership by committing $20.35 million to move the Cincinnati Police Department firing range. Half is from federal pandemic funding, but half comes from the county’s general fund – a huge commitment. Meanwhile, Cincinnati Vice Mayor Jan-Michele Lemon Kearny, an Episcopalian, facilitated meetings which led to a multi-jurisdictional agreement to expand the current county police training facility in a wooded area of Colerain, far from any residential area. The City of Cincinnati committed $4.25 million, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown secured a $4 million federal commitment, and State Representative Cindy Abrams won $3 million from the State of Ohio.
This expanded facility is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2026. Amen, Alleluia!
